Elizabeth Hurley’s son was papped as a toddler, has Elton John as a godfather and now, aged 21, he’s directing his mother in, yes, an erotic thriller.
Damian Hurley isn’t easily rattled. “I’ve never really been starstruck,” he says. “I’ve grown up around industry giants so I’m fairly unflappable.” Though Elizabeth Hurley’s son admits that he was minorly flapped when cast in a modelling campaign alongside Naomi Campbell. Thankfully the original Nineties super model is an “old family friend” and offered advice. “She really taught me — this is very interesting — so you have to have two thoughts when you’re looking into the camera, either ‘f*** me’ or ‘f*** you’,” he says. “It’s completely true. When you look at every single model in the world, that is what they’re thinking.”
Can I see his “f*** me” expression versus his “f*** you”? “Oh, I beg you no,” he says, giggling.
Talking to Hurley is a hoot. It’s as if Elizabeth Hurley has swallowed a Gen Z Nicky Haslam. The 21-year-old tosses his long, chestnut mane and keeps trotting around the Los Angeles home of “Godfather Elton [John]” (which looks 50 shades of cream) trying to get a better internet connection. Speaking as if he has a plum in each cheek, he purrs things like, “Giancarlo and Valentino [the Italian designer and his business partner] are some of my mother’s best friends in the world. I go on their boat nearly every summer. I’ve been really, really spoilt, unfortunately.”
For Hurley it has been a life of red carpets and superyachts. Indeed, us mere mortals have long been fascinated by this showbiz princeling who has appeared in magazines since he was a baby but rarely gives proper interviews. We’ve watched him slowly morph into his mother — all pouts, low necklines and flowing locks — and idly wondered about their tell-each-other-everything relationship.
When we speak over Zoom he has just landed in Tinseltown in time for the Oscars bash thrown by Elton and the Vanity Fair afterparty. But business brings him to Hollywood too: he has written and directed his first feature film, Strictly Confidential, an erotic thriller that stars his mum as a woman who has a lusty affair with a woman decades her junior. “I’m bored of the one-dimensional way women are shown in cinema. It was so nice not to be a part of that,” says Hurley, who went straight from Wellington College, a boarding school in Berkshire, into the world of movie-making. “Of course, once I’d written this glamorous, glorious woman, I went, it’s got to be mum.”
Hurley Jr directs Hurley Sr, 58, being snogged and pawed by her lover (played by Pear Chiravara, a twentysomething influencer). It’s all mega-cleavages, murder and mad plot twists. Plus, a starring role for Liz’s swimwear range. (“The most flattering bikinis in the world,” Hurley Jr says, loyally.) How was it to direct his mother in such steamy scenes? “I hate to say that it felt totally normal. I don’t know what that says about us,” he says, adding that he doesn’t understand the fuss over the fact that he takes some of his mum’s bikini photos for Instagram. “It’s business. We don’t think about it for any more than point, press, done, post.”
Hurley wonders if, perhaps, it’s just hard for normal folk to understand. “I was speaking to a lot of my friends who are also second generation of parents in the industry,” he says straight-faced. “They say exactly the same thing: that things to outsiders that may seem totally strange and extraordinary, for us we’ll just have grown up with in everyday life.” His pals include Iris Law (daughter of Jude), Lila Moss (daughter of Kate) and Brooklyn Beckham (well, you know). “I’ve managed to escape a lot of the fire of the nepo-baby stuff because anyone who looks at me has gone, ‘Oh, actually, hang on, you’ve been working exceptionally hard since you were 15 years old’,” he says, referring to his past modelling career (he has been shot by Steven Meisel and Mert and Marcus).
There was no need for any intimacy coordinators on set — “everyone was very comfortable” — and Hurley seems chuffed that his mum, the star of Bedazzled and Austin Powers, took on such a raunchy role. “I don’t think she has ever been cast in a sexier part at this point in her career,” he says, grinning. “People are realising that rules don’t really exist any more for ageing, growing up, acting responsibly.”
The mother and son are intensely close. “We’re like siblings. I think when it’s just two of you, any farce of ‘I’m the parent, you’re the child, I’m going to tell you off’ goes out the window,” he says. “You start seeing each other as real humans way sooner than when there are two parents, two kids, and you’re separated from the adults.”
The pair share opinions, beauty products and clothes. “I steal leather trousers all the time when we’re the same size,” he confesses. “Jackets are always great. Any big, oversized blazers she steals in a heartbeat.” He lights up while talking about that safety-pin dress Liz wore three decades ago as Hugh Grant’s girlfriend at the Four Weddings and a Funeral premiere: “It put Versace on the map, it transformed my mother’s life overnight, and it really changed the entire concept of celebrity, the entire concept of red-carpet moments.”
Hurley was about five and living in London when he clocked that his life wasn’t normal. “I’d just had a particularly gruelling [time] being chased by paparazzi on motorbikes on the way to school. I got in and I remember saying, ‘Oh, don’t you guys just hate those men?’ And they were like, ‘What?’ I thought every single person was chased to school by men screaming in their face and flashing cameras,” he says. “I had no idea.”
Soon after, the pair escaped to live in Gloucestershire. He details how his mum still has PTSD from those pap-hounding days, while he’s paranoid about lurking photographers and eavesdroppers. “It’s a horrible way to live. You feel like you’re in the Mob … it’s also the price of doing business,” he says. “Unfortunately I’m in a career where your success is measured by how famous you are. I wish I could take the success and opt out of fame. That’s sadly not possible.”
One of the Hurley duo’s mantras is to care about only what friends and family think and ignore the haters. He describes the “twin telepathy” he has with his mum and how they can “have complete conversations just nodding and shaking our heads”. Their closeness has been especially crucial lately: “My mum has been a phenomenal constant for my entire life, but really in the past few years. I can’t put it into words.”
The past four years have been brutal. Hurley’s biological father, Steve Bing, the wealthy American businessman with whom his mother had a brief relationship in 2001, took his own life in 2020. Bing, who also had a daughter a few years older than Hurley, had wrestled with depression and drug addiction. The tragedy came not long after Bing had started building a relationship with his son. Contrary to media reports, Hurley says that he had met his father, but avoids the details (“maybe I’ll write a book one day”). Then, less than two years later, Shane Warne, the cricketer and former boyfriend of Elizabeth, suffered a fatal heart attack while on holiday in Thailand, aged 52.
“Shane was unequivocally a tragedy. There was no confusion or anger. It was just grief and horrific,” says Hurley, who still thinks of Warne’s three children as his family. “When my biological father died there was immense grief, a lot of regret, anger, sadness. There was so much. It was a very different process.” In 2021, on the first anniversary of Bing’s suicide, Hurley published an Instagram post about how hard he’d found the year. “It’s not weak to struggle,” he wrote.
Today he squirms about such sincerity. “Did I say that? As artists and creators we’re all meant to sit and talk about our emotions, but also as British people we’re meant to pretend emotions don’t exist. It’s a strange dichotomy,” he says. “If every single person in the world was open about when they find things tough, I think everyone would be much happier and feel much less alone.”
The countless condolence messages that he received on social media gave him great comfort, though Hurley admits to not being that far along the grief process: “It’s a horrific thing. I think it’s something that you really want to give time. But, at the same time, I’m very aware it could explode tomorrow.”
Strictly Confidential includes themes of death and a father found at the bottom of a cliff. He found making the movie, shot over 18 days in December 2022 in Saint Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean, both cathartic and exhilarating. “I was so frantic that I could hardly breathe for the entire shoot,” Hurley says, speaking a mile a minute. “Your body is sent totally through the wringer. I lost 20 pounds in 10 days down to stress. When you’re a perfectionist you don’t do things by halves, it’s impossible.”
Elizabeth was there as a sounding board. “The power dynamic between an actor and director is challenging and complicated at the best of times. Even more when you’re factoring in a child bossing around their parent,” he says. “We’re extraordinarily alike … apart from having the same face, we are really, really in tune. It’s like having an extension to your brain to double-check things.”
Besides, the budding auteur has been directing his mum and his other A-list godfather, Hugh Grant, in the short films that he has been making since he was eight. The themes back then were “people having risky affairs and everyone getting each other pregnant”. In Hurley’s childhood debut film, Grant played a corrupt judge. “He was brilliant. I made him wear a bald cap,” he recalls, adding that it was Godfather Hugh who advised him to start his career behind the camera. “He’s right because even if you’re the best actor in the entire world, if you have no creative control you’re sitting by the phone waiting for someone to bring something to you.” As a teen Hurley appeared alongside his mum in three episodes of The Royals, an American soapy drama, playing the Crown Prince of Liechtenstein.
He’s already working on his next film. The plot? A woman in her forties has an affair with a “much, much younger man” and a “strange love triangle” ensues.
In real life Hurley has recently started seeing someone new. “I was single when lockdown started and it was quite freeing, but then I actually really missed having someone to bore about how my day had been,” he says. The new, unidentified partner hasn’t yet met his mum, but he seems relaxed: “If I like them she probably will too. God, I hope so.”
I imagine Liz gave him the birds and the bees chat early? “I learnt about sex when I was ludicrously young,” he says. “She was like, ‘With sex, it’s a beautiful, natural part of being human and of life.’ Whereas when we were watching movies she banned me from seeing any violence at all.”
What an extraordinary life he has led. At age eight, Hurley was sent to an all-boys boarding school, which he professes to have loved: “We were in the countryside, so we were sprinting around fields behaving terribly.” Back at home his mother was “very, very, very cautious” not to introduce him to any of her boyfriends unless they were serious. “My mum has taught me a lot about relationships in general. I’ve seen how relationships that the public get their hands on can be destroyed,” he says. “With who she’s seeing now, unless she’s engaged, it’s not going to go public. And I really think the same for me.”
These days Hurley shudders at the idea of going “out-out”. “I couldn’t be paid to go and stand in a sweaty club,” he says, adding that he “can’t imagine” doing drugs. Three years ago he gave up drinking. “Friends of mine said, ’Obviously that’s to do with your father dying and his addiction issues and all the above.’ I don’t know,” he says, wearily. “It’s just something that felt quite natural at the time.” He describes himself as “married to my career”, acknowledging that keeping so busy could be “terribly avoidant”. Therapy, the one time he tried it, wasn’t for him: “Perhaps I’ll have time after I’ve directed my tenth movie.”
In the future Hurley imagines getting back in front of the camera again. “Maybe I’ll turn totally obnoxious and write, direct and star in something,” he says. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
- Strictly Confidential is available to watch digitally from May 13
Written by: Laura Pullman
© The Times of London